Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 film is a playful, fractured homage to Catherine Ringer, set around Les Rita Mitsouko’s studio sessions and the restless energy of creation. A perfectionist filmmaker called “the Idiot” tries to finance a new project while Godard threads together the 1986 recording sessions for Fred Chichin and Catherine Ringer’s album The No Comprendo. The result is a witty, self-reflexive portrait of artistic labor, music, and cinema colliding in a loose, dreamlike flow.
Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s monumental Battle of Chile chronicles the last months of Salvador Allende’s government with unflinching proximity. Combining rigorous observational footage, testimony and political analysis, Guzmán captures public assemblies, factory life and mass mobilisation as history unfolds. This early trilogy—parts I–III—shaped his lifelong interrogation of memory, power and exile, blending investigative urgency with poetic reflection. Shot with intimate close-ups and collective panoramas, the films probe trauma, hope and the ethics of remembering.
Founded in 1995, the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF) is one of Geneva’s longest-standing cinema festivals and among the first in the world to integrate television into its programming. A hub for experimentation, encounters, and celebration, the ten-day festival presents films, series, and immersive audiovisual experiences to some 35,000 visitors each year. GIFF also hosts the Geneva Digital Market, Switzerland’s only meeting point for professionals in innovation and audiovisual content, and maintains year-round activities including school programmes and GIFF UNLIMITED events. Recognized as a key driver of Switzerland’s audiovisual sector, GIFF combines artistic ambition with international reach.
Orkhan Aghazadeh’s tender documentary follows an elderly projectionist in an isolated Azerbaijani village as he strives to revive the local cinema after years without a screening room. Observational and intimate in approach, the film captures quiet gestures, communal rituals and the projectionist’s relationship to memory, passion and intergenerational transmission. Through patient framing and subtle soundscapes, it becomes a reflection on cultural persistence, the fate of traditional film spaces and the communal power of shared images.
Talysh and Russian with French subtitles. Screening in collaboration with Let’s Doc! (National Documentary Month). Screening followed by a discussion.
Founded in Geneva in 1951 by cinema enthusiasts including Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, the Ciné-club universitaire de Genève (CCU) has spent 75 years bringing audiences together around singular films and shared discoveries.
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the CCU looks back across more than seven decades of cinema with a programme of 30 films spanning continents, genres, generations and perspectives — while looking towards the future of the seventh art.
Anne-Frédérique Widmann’s documentary traces the long fight of Shewit Tekie, whose search for safety becomes a portrait of resilience and self-determination. Moving from Eritrea to Libya and then to Switzerland, the film follows her struggle to rebuild her life after exploitation, uncertainty, and the threat of deportation. Filmed over ten years, it blends testimony and intimacy in a restrained, human approach that gives full weight to a powerful story of emancipation.
The screening will be followed by a short discussion with the film’s protagonist, Shewit Tekie; the director, Anne-Frédérique Widmann; and the co-head of the organization AMIC, Melete Solomon.
Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner plunges into a rain-drenched, neon metropolis where bounty hunter Rick Deckard tracks synthetic replicants. The film’s measured pacing and lingering frames foreground questions of identity, memory and empathy, probing what separates human from artificial life. Dense, noir-inflected visuals and a melancholic atmosphere give the story an elegiac tone, balancing tense encounters with reflective solitude. Its interrogation of consciousness and longing lingers long after the credits.
Screening featuring live analysis and audience discussion. In French.
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